SJ`s Cold War Relics
It looks innocent enough: a decaying doorway. But it leads to an almost forgotten past when homeland defense meant supersonic Nike missiles and atomic warheads. Donald Bender a cold war weapons expert shows this man-made cavern. It is part of Nike base PH-23-25 near Lumberton, New Jersey, one of a web of twelve such installations that once surrounded and guarded this area.
Donald Bender/cold war expert: "The missiles were held underground for safety reasons."
Heavy blast doors and escape hatches offered missile crews some protection from something going terribly wrong.
Donald Bender/cold war expert: "There was one notable incident... ten people killed."
The missiles are long gone, but for almost 20 years beginning in the 1950s the press of a button would boost a five ton Nike Hercules and warhead to above ground where it could be fired.
Down the road, the abandoned radar towers still stand.
Operators once swept the sky 24-7 looking for terror, not from hijacked airliners or anthrax.
The fear then, and it was a very real fear, was that terror would come from the skies with waves of Soviet bombers carrying nuclear weapons.
Nike was the last ditch defense. If bombers got to east coast airspace the Nike Hercules was designed to go nuclear in the sky above our own back yard with a punch as powerful as the bombs dropped on Japan.
"They contain a small new atomic device that can protect us safely," is what publicity films said at the time.
For those protecting the homeland, defensive atomic warheads were the lesser of two evils.
The Soviet bombers of course never came.
Nike missile were never fired in anger, by the early 1970s they were obsolete.
In Lumberton grass grows and impounded cars sit at the launch site. The township uses the magazine for storage.
As for the radar site, there is talk of not plowshares but playing fields.
Bender wants to see some of the Nike facilities, like the one behind the barbed wire in Pedricktown, restored so we don't forget when the homeland faced a very different kind of threat.
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Author: 6 - ABC, Action News
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